Page 359 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 32: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Intertextual Analysis)

that the woman may be exhibited. In addition, the voice of a woman is seldom given the powerful Notes
position of voice-over narration. With rare and problematic exceptions such as Hitchcock's Rebecca,
extradiegetic voiceover is inevitably male in Hollywood films, including Casablanca with its voice-
of-god newsreel voice in the prologue. The subordination of women in patriarchal cinema has
even been extended to situations in which heroines are quite literally deprived of voice, the most
often cited example being Johnny Belinda. Appropriately, at the end of Casablanca, Ilsa has very
little to say to either Rick or Laszlo, her lying silences giving way to a continuing renunciation of
voice after the crucial love scene "up a flight" in which she asks Rick to do the thinking--and
speaking- -for both of them.
The film's sadistic treatment of Ilsa takes a substantial toll in tears, often revealed in tight closeups
of her fetishized face. The almost kittenish sexuality of Ingrid Bergman's face, combined with her
country-girl wholesomeness, provides the male viewer I with an object of aesthetic perfection
sufficient to ward off the thought of castration. Significantly, the first Mt. Rushmore closeup of
Bergman in Casablanca takes place as she listens, lost in thought, to Sam playing "As Time Goes
By." Mulvey points out that musicals are typical of the patriarchal order of classical cinema in their
careful separation of performance numbers--often featuring scantily clad females--from the diegesis
so that the viewer can divert all his attention to contemplating the female body. There is always a
risk in interrupting the diegesis, however, because the involving flow of the story effectively
stops. Mulvey mentions the "buddy movie," in which the eroticized display of women is entirely
eliminated, as one solution to this problem. The long closeup of Bergman's face as she listens to the
music is perhaps an even better solution, integrating a moment of fetishized display into a diegetic
sequence that prepares us for the climactic reunion of Rick and Ilsa.
32.5 "Moonlight and Love Songs Never Out of Date"

Until recently, little work had been done on the importance of background music in classical
cinema. Claudia Gorbman is one of a handful of critics who have productively brought
psychoanalytic theories of music into film study. She cites a number of Lacanian writers who have
associated music with a pre-Oedipal stage in which the child lives in a "sonorous envelope"
dominated by the pleasingly rhythmic sound of the mother's heart, and later by the soothing,
musical sound of her voice. By promoting "benign regression" to the blissful time before the child
senses that it is separate from the mother, movie music "invokes the (auditory) imaginary.
"Furthermore, music is free from linguistic signification and other kinds of representation, and
thus it can more easily bypass defense systems and penetrate to the unconscious. Gorbman accepts
the arguments of Metz and others that dominant cinema attempts to erase the signs of its workings
by casting the viewer as the subject rather than the object of the film' s enunciation. "Music greases
the wheels of cinematic pleasure by easing the spectator's passage into subjectivity."
Although she does not dwell on Casablanca, Gorbman devotes an entire chapter to the work of
Max Steiner, the prolific composer who scored Casablanca, in order to illustrate "classical Hollywood
practice." After establishing a set of principles for the use of music in Hollywood films (invisibility,
"inaudibility," signifier of emotion, narrative cuing, continuity, unity, and the legitimate violation
of any principle at the service of another), Gorbman undertakes a discussion of "the epic feeling"
of music that is especially relevant to the appeal of Casablanca. Remarking on the anthropological
analysis of musical elements in rituals that bind together human communities, she notes how
music in classical cinema can be put to use for the pleasureful creation of the sense of commonality.
The most obvious example of this phenomenon occurs diegetically in Casablanca when Laszlo
leads the non-German patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain in a performance of "La Marseillaise,"
eliciting patriotic tears even from the sexually collaborationist Yvonne (Madeleine Le Beau). The
extradiegetic music in Casablanca is carefully constructed to elicit appropriate emotions from the
audience, usually the same emotions that the film attributes to Rick. The most striking example is
the string orchestra voicing of "As Time Goes By" that is superimposed on Sam's diegetic piano
after Rick insists on hearing the song. Steiner's music intrudes "inaudibly" at this crucial moment
in order to seal us into Rick's -- and the film's--imaginary, the pre-Oedipal scenes in Paris before
the arrival of the Germans and the departure of Ilsa.

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